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What’s permanent? What’s temporary? Perceptions of time frame the way we work together.

I was debating project and service management standards the other day. (Yep, I lead a sad life.)

To be honest, it wasn’t much of a debate. We all agreed on the big stuff – that projects and services overlap; that we all need to work together to deliver value; that people and skills matter more than standards and controls.

A lot of motherhood and apple pie really. Boring.

Throughout the debate, I felt we were missing something. There was a big divergence in our underlying mindsets; we just weren’t getting at it. Afterwards, I realised this was due to the framing of the debate.

The rise of smartphones and tablets has ushered in a huge shift in how consumers engage with brands.

These changes have fundamentally altered the path to purchase, which used to be a linear process, into a much broader mix of browsing and discovery, with social recommendations and easier access to information driving the online buying process.

Most notably, this shift is changing the way IT and Marketing, two divisions that have often worked in silos, must operate in response.

Underscoring the importance of these changes, Gartner recently reported that future ecommerce success depends on improving the customer experience, with top CIOs now ranking it as the largest opportunity to implement technology in driving business innovation.

IT departments can create a lot of value when they take responsibility for Integration Technology, bringing together the activities of people across the organisation and beyond its increasingly porous boundaries.

But if they sit behind their firewalls chanting verses from the ITIL, then they deserve to die.

With the global economy continuing to tumble and the layoff announcements continuing to flow day after day, it’s a depressing time to be looking for a job.

But that doesn’t mean that they’re not out there and despite the layoffs at major technology companies, IT is still crucial to most businesses and there are opportunities out there. In its 2009 IT Hiring Trends report, staffing provider Veritude provides a good overview of where that opportunity is.